Becoming a Self-Study Researcher: Learning Method Through Practice

Calls for methodological innovation in qualitative research often assume that researchers can readily adopt new approaches once they are introduced. Yet adoption presupposes learning, and far less attention has been given to how scholars come to understand and enact unfamiliar methodologies, particularly those that challenge entrenched assumptions about rigor, evidence, and researcher positioning. This study examines how three engineering faculty members learned self-study of professional practice through participation in a facilitated, collaborative inquiry. Using self-study as both methodology and site of investigation, we analyzed reflective journals, recorded dialogues, and analytic artifacts to examine methodological learning as it unfolded in practice. Findings highlight three interrelated dimensions of learning self-study: disrupting individualistic norms of higher education teaching through collaborative improvement; negotiating legitimacy and redefining rigor amid disciplinary traditions privileging procedural certainty; and developing methodological coherence by collectively determining scope, data, and analytic procedures in the absence of standardized templates. Across findings, learning self-study emerged not as the acquisition of procedural knowledge but as an epistemological transition and relational becoming. Participants developed increased capacity to work productively within uncertainty, articulate qualitative rigor, and engage in collaboration as analytic labor. This study advances qualitative methodology by theorizing methodological learning as situated, dialogic, and identity-shaping work. By foregrounding how faculty outside teacher education learn to inhabit self-study, the article extends scholarship on self-study pedagogy and contributes to broader conversations about methodological apprenticeship, epistemological translation across disciplines, and the relational production of qualitative research knowledge.